hymn of three cherries and an apricot

you brought a bowl

of orchard cherries

so black red, so well read,

I blush just remembering how

they crushed and

fled their skins inside my mouth.

for the road I saved three,

and a perfect apricot sun

wrapped in a paper napkin,

but not for me. they sat

in the passenger seat, patiently,

a sweet lopsided quartet,

leaning with me around miles

of mountain curves.

the apricot went first.

(oh yes, I dared my teeth)

velvet cleavage, tart bursting

cousin of peach.

(the cherries, singing, start

to preach: O pit,

a wrinkled prayer!)

I meant to save them

for my kids, I really did.

but none were spared.

one by one, over a day

in two cars and a dim morning

kitchen, I hmmmnned them in,

and in and in.

featured on Center for Integrated Arts website, March 2009

spring forward, fall back: what are you doing with your extra Hour, he asked

She made a melody for lyrics she wrote, graded five essays, and

checked her email too many times for words that didn’t come.

She spoke of and sounded the letter H with her youngest son:

Hen, House, and Horse, of course. And didn’t

tell him of a man’s blue Hallelujah eyes, or his Hands

a fivefold Heaven on her Hips.  Instead, she Helped him circle

a Heart.  She also watched a House burn bright across

the prairie of night with her daughter.  Maybe she used

some of the Hour to pray.  For the inhabitants of the House,

and then for her elder son’s friend whose brain is angry with a Hundred

wires, right eye swollen, waiting for seizures to be incised from his life,

because wily electricity can be sliced off our bodies with scalpels.

She also captured vomit once in a bucket, and as she waited expectantly

for the second batch, she Heard from the son concerned with H’s

that throwing up is Hard.  Yes, it is, Honey, throwing up is Hard.

Later, she Hugged her Husband from behind, with Hidden tears,

as he listened to the song she played him all those years ago.

She remembered she loves him, touched by how he seeks to please her,

letting Hair Hang long down along and around his face like a silken windy

Halo.  In that Hour, she inhaled his neck, still Haunted by Hallelujah.  How?

Can her Heart ever be circled?  Hoping for her boys’ sleep, she read

of a fox tamed by a little prince whose Hair, the color of golden wheat,

made the fox Happy, made him anticipate. Then, as she read in bed, to only

herself, after setting her soothing zen alarm clock for Monday morning, thankful

for the extra Hour of sleep she would be getting, she instructed her daughter

to put a peeled clove of garlic in her Hurting ear, rather than rise, rather than

do it for her.  And she fell asleep unsure of where her extra Hour ended or began.

featured in Blood Lotus, Spring 2008

the white blues (out of the blue)

Ice-blue eyes squint beneath

white sky, want to close against

white streets turning black beneath

people moving slowly through January.

Two long toes of a sugar beet plant spew white smoke,

poke up through the blue sky edge of a cloud blanket,

white sheet unable to stretch far enough west to cover

the feet of a sleeping town.

To this bright blue gap the eyes rise

before resting on anything white, try to fly

out this window to invisible western mountains.

But perched in a skull on the eastside of town,

they cannot see the icy peaks promising sea

a thousand miles beyond their snowy seam. Instead

eyes close and look inside, find a mindscape

just as white as land and sky today. This hidden sight

rides any willing memory: restless horses

wild eyed with pining, despair straining

to flee, to be anywhere but endless fields of white,

trying to run through some man’s sky-blue eyes

unable to receive their flight. The horses

rear and cry for all the empty places of life. 

Not empty like hunger or angst, but empty

like snow, crystals of water full of space and cold,

refracting light. It is space that takes the flake’s radial shape,

shining as it melts away. Space that makes the eyes too free

to know what or where to think, seek blue. The space

around the horses doesn’t blink. The eyes can’t ride

away. They open, become this I writing in ink, and suddenly

I am space taking a drink of peppermint tea. And space

crossing her legs trying not to think about the space

between his ebbing eyes and the melting

ice of mine.  The blue sky retreats. Go ahead and cry.

This is all I know to write when there is this much white

and I can’t see beyond the space inside the radiating pattern

of me:  warming, spreading, heading toward every sea.